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Tag: redbear

Look what a little beauty the mailman brought! I participated the Red Bear Duo Kickstarter Campaign a while ago, and the folks at Redbear did a really professional job in delivering on the promises of that campaign.

Headline features include ARM Cortex M3 120 MHz microcontroller with plenty of RAM and flash, and of course dual WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. Setting up the Duo was quite simple by following the instructions provided, once I realized I’ll need to use the Zadig tool as instructed in this sub-howto (Redbear guys: I think 4-5 separate pages to get one started on Windows is something that might be optimized), I got the firmware updated and everything set up. Basic outline of my installation was about this:

Plug in the board and see LEDs light up

Try to install the serial driver, only to realize I already had working serial (I probably have all usb serial drivers between heaven and earth installed due to encounters with various devboards)

Connect to COM6, 9600 with Putty to verify it works as it should, note down device ID

Install dfu-util, and wonder why I cannot connect to the device, even with the yellow LED (looked more like yellow-green though) was blinking as it should

Use Zadig tool to install drivers when in DFU mode

Successfully update firmware and stuff

Reboot the board a couple of times and connect with Putty to COM6 to see the IP address

Visit the IP address to see the LED demo is working as it should! Nice!

Particle.io Cloud Programming

Once I had the basics figured out, I wanted to try out the Particle.io cloud development platform. It seems like an Arduino on cloud steroids, meaning that instead of flashing the device over USB cable, you write the software in a web interface, and flashing the device will upload the sketch to your device using the active wifi connection on Redbear Duo (I believe the device is periodically polling Particle.io service to see if there is a new sketch to download).Continue reading RedBear Duo First Impressions